Exploring visual journalism

Dive into the dark world of Weegee: Murder is My Business

If you need an excuse to visit New York City before summer’s end, here’s a suggestion: Dive into the dark world of Weegee, a tabloid news photographer-extraordinaire. His work is the subject of a fascinating show, “Weegee: Murder is My Business,” at the International Center of Photography in midtown Manhattan through September 2, 2012.

On the spot, December 9, 1939. Weegee standing at right with camera.Taken by unidentified photographer. (Courtesy: International Center of Photography)

Line-Up for Night Court, ca. 1941. Taken by Weegee. (Courtesy: International Center of Photography)

Their first murder, ca. October 8, 1941. Taken by Weegee. (Courtesy: International Center of Photography)

The dead man’s wife arrived…and then she collapsed, ca. 1940. Taken by Weegee. (Courtesy: International Center of Photography)

Murder, ca. 1940. Taken by Weegee. (Courtesy: International Center of Photography)

Anthony Esposito, booked on suspicion of killing a policeman, New York, ca. January 16, 1941. Taken by Weegee. (Courtesy: International Center of Photography)

Weegee covering the morning police line-up at police headquarters, New York, ca. 1939. Taken by unidentified photographer. (Courtesy: International Center of Photography)

Installation view of “Weegee: Murder Is My Business,” at the Photo League, New York, 1941. (Courtesy: International Center of Photography)

May 17, 1991: A 10-year old boy was arrested for holding up a 9-year-old boy with a .22 caliber revolver to get a beanie cap (both pictured at left). He was in handcuffs at the Eastern District police station, waiting to be taken home by his mother. The arresting officer was Edward Wojcik. (Amy Davis/Baltimore Sun)

March 15, 1995: Police investigate the scene near South Bethel Street behind Lombard Middle School, where the body of a white, adult female was found at the bottom of a sunken stairwell. Joey Mosby, a 6th grader at the school, watches the detectives. (Amy Davis/Baltimore Sun)

July 30, 2007: Beach vacationers Nikki Amos, left, with friend Elizabeth Davis, second from left in front, watch FBI investigators search the grounds around an Ocean City house where four dead infants were found. (Amy Davis/Baltimore Sun)

December 20, 2007: A blood-stained sidewalk in the 2600 block of South Paca Street in Westport marks the 277th homicide of 2007 — topping the previous year’s total. At around 3 a.m., an adult male was shot in the head on this residential block, and when this photo was taken over six hours later, blood stains were still visible on the sidewalk and street. (Amy Davis/Baltimore Sun)

December 26, 2008: After investigating the scene of a homicide outside William C. March Middle School, police cover the body before removing it from school grounds. (Amy Davis/Baltimore Sun)

January 9, 2011: An officer walks by the evidence markers at a homicide investigation in a parking lot on West Franklin Street near the Select Lounge. A plain-clothes officer was killed by another officer called to the scene after gunfire erupted outside the club. One civilian, among the six people in all who were shot, was also killed in the chaos. (Amy Davis/Baltimore Sun)

Weegee covering the morning police line-up at police headquarters, New York, ca. 1939. Taken by unidentified photographer. (Courtesy: International Center of Photography)

Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee, took graphic photos revealing the seamy side of New York City in the Thirties and Forties.

Born in 1899 as Usher Fellig, the famed photographer grew up in a Jewish shtetl in the Russian Pale of Settlement (now the Ukraine). His family fled the pogroms, settling in the Lower East Side of New York in 1909, where Usher was Americanized to Arthur. The poverty of his youth and the melting pot of his immigrant neighborhood made him an empathetic witness of the frailties of humanity.

Fellig gravitated toward photography as a young man, and landed a job at the New York Times, where one of his tasks was to squeegee excess water from prints before they were dried. Some say that the darkroom moniker “squeegee boy” is the origin of his professional name of Weegee. Fellig preferred to play up the similarity of Weegee to Ouija, the popular game in the Twenties that predicted the future.

As a news photographer, he was equipped with a shortwave radio in his car, and hook-ups to police and fire alarms in his dingy rented room. Fellig was often at the scene of a crime before the police. The name Weegee helped Fellig burnish his image as a photographer with uncanny instincts for being at the right place at the right time. The right time meant that Weegee was up close and personal with murder victims and their ever-present audience, the gawkers who fluttered like moths to the bright light of his flash gun and the free entertainment of unfolding sidewalk tragedies.

The ICP exhibit opens with a photograph of Weegee on a tenement fire escape, perched like a leopard stalking its prey. As a photojournalist, my first admiring thought was that a good visual observer always looks for an unusual angle to make a photograph. Then I learned that this was the fire escape outside his rented room, which was strategically located across the street from the police station in downtown Manhattan. Clearly Weegee’s photographic pursuits, mostly nocturnal, were not just his meager bread and butter, but the center of his life. The ICP exhibit reinforces the scrappy freelancer’s single-minded focus by recreating his actual cold-water flat, devoid of anything unrelated to the business of photography.

Weegee’s photographs, sold to numerous daily papers, are mesmerizing in their stark, unflinching documentation of murder victims, nabbed suspects, and the wide-eyed cast of characters who witnessed every crime. Lest you cringe at the subject matter, look closely at how he observes each scene, with his direct flash shedding penetrating light on both victims and their audience. It is not the blood and dead bodies that Weegee is really interested in. The documentation of crime scenes paid the bills, to be sure, but Weegee was actually after the range of unguarded emotional reactions to homicide.

Many of the pictures, with their harshly lit faces and large swaths of blackness, look theatrical yet intimate. Each is a stage set of New York in the decade before World War II. The murder weapons, the overturned men’s hats, and even the crumpled bodies appear as props. The police are the wooden actors populating most of the calamities, called upon to deal with captured hoodlums, grieving relatives and the protection of crime scenes (though they often appear to be handling the evidence in a cavalier manner). The observers, young and old, are the most engaging actors in Weegee’s one-act plays about life and death on New York’s gritty streets. The glint of his flash especially seems to capture his subject’s eyes, whether filled with tears of grief when confronted with the murder of their loved ones, or wide-open in fascination at the sight of a stranger’s blood.

I was drawn to photojournalism, in part, after seeing the work of Weegee and other photographers from the early decades of the 20th century, when technological improvements in reproduction and cameras made photography an essential component of newspapers. The emotional directness of these images was a refreshing change from the sometimes-pretentious fine art photography scene I observed as a young art student in New York. The details of the photographs may be quaint (and add greatly to their value), but the universality of the human emotions documented are timeless.

At The Baltimore Sun, staff photographers cover a wide range of assignments, with “spot news” only a small part of the mix. We rarely arrive as quickly as Weegee did, but sometimes we do capture the raw aftermath of crime scenes. Covering unplanned, unfolding news is an especially gratifying challenge, even though we don’t relish witnessing tragedy. I’ve added a few of my photos documenting the aftermath of several murders, in homage to Weegee and the others who managed to make powerful images with unwieldy equipment in the pre-digital age. This year Baltimore finally lost its ranking as one of the nation’s five deadliest cities, with both homicides and non-fatal shootings down in 2011, but we are not out of the crime photography business yet.

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The Darkroom, the photography and video blog of The Baltimore Sun, shines a light on visually captivating stories of our past and present. It showcases the exciting work of our staff, offers tips in the craft, and highlights the emerging community of independent media makers. We want your feedback – please contact us with suggestions and ideas.